During Nvidia’s GTC AI Conference in San Jose earlier this month, VP and GM of Media & Entertainment Richard Kerris presented the Nvidia Media2 initiative that builds on the company’s Blackwell GPU foundation to enable real-time AI solutions for all aspects of media production workflows. His talk showcased a broad range of generative AI breakthroughs in real-time ray tracing and VFX, video search and summarization, and musically-based sound effects (SFX). Kerris also shared insights on the media industry’s reception to AI thus far and humbly implored the audience to consider using such technology as an effective new tool for storytelling.

Titled “How AI is Transforming the Way We Create, Personalize, and Share Content,” the session followed CEO Jensen Huang’s keynote the day before that unveiled Nvidia’s professional-grade RTX PRO Blackwell series of graphics cards for data centers and workstations — in particular, their most powerful GPU: the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell.

Kerris began his session by highlighting new features in the GPU series for accelerating media production, including the new Streaming Multiprocessor (SM) powered by Nvidia’s next-gen RT (ray tracing) Cores and Tensor Cores that can deliver hyper-realistic graphics in real time and speed up 4:2:2 video processing.

Advances in these cores enable the company’s suite of neural rendering technologies to perform at 100 times more ray-traced triangles per frame.

Another much-appreciated upgrade is boosting the GPU’s VRAM to 96GB, enabling high-resolution scenes to be rendered entirely in memory. Pixar Animation CTO Steve May has touted that 99 percent of their shots can now fit within the memory of an RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell GPU. To illustrate that, Kerris treated the crowd with a 54GB scene from Pixar’s upcoming movie “Elio.”

Similarly, Lucasfilm Principal Rendering Engineer Stephen Hill has lauded that the GPU’s memory raised their ILM StageCraft virtual production’s performance 2.5 times when rendering 6K and 8K videos in real time on set. Kerris shared that RTX PRO GPUs have aided Disney’s production of the “Star Wars: Skeleton Crew” series.

Kerris said that 20 percent of current feature films create real-time VFX during on-set production and suggested this trend will jump to 70 percent in the next few years. He believes RTX PRO Blackwell will be the platform to facilitate that growth.

His discussion on Nvidia Media2 detailed its vision to integrate the company’s AI-native hardware and software stack into every aspect of the production workflow to uncover novel use cases and accelerate performance, from content creation all the way to distribution.

Kerris also recapped Nvidia Research’s recently introduced Fugatto — an audio foundational AI model that generates or transforms any mix of music, voice and sounds as prompted by text or other audio inputs.

Kerris acknowledged the M&E industry has often responded with uncertainty about a transition for creativity enhanced by AI-accelerated tools. He recounted the industry’s worries when it was revealed that nascent AI research had trained on material from the Web without copyright attributions.

However, he suggests that approach was only for the purpose of exploratory research and the industry should consider those issues when time comes for commercial productions. Kerris claims that the generative AI tools of Nvidia’s partners are responsibly trained with data from trusted sources that respect artist attributions. An example is Adobe’s Firefly app for AI-generated images and videos that features IP indemnification for enterprise customers.

Kerris summarized his talk by earnestly imploring the industry to further understand and openly discuss these “beautiful” AI-enabled creative tools in order to develop trust in them. “New tools make new stories possible,” he concluded.

Related:
Blackwell Powers Real-Time AI for Entertainment Workflows. Nvidia Blog, 3/19/25
Nvidia Blackwell Ultra AI Factory Platform Paves Way for Age of AI Reasoning, Nvidia Newsroom, 3/18/25
Nvidia Announces Blackwell Ultra and Rubin AI Chips, CNBC, 3/18/25
New Blackwell AI Chip Helps Boost Nvidia to Record Quarter, ETCentric, 2/28/25
GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs, ETCentric, 3/20/24